Mapping government policies online - Govmonitor, a great new aussie site

For all the attention on government policies, the various announcements and documentation on political party sites, it can be very difficult to compare and contrast where different parties sit on different issues and, for governments, difficult to keep track of whether they are sticking to their election policies or amending them for pragmatic, political or other reasons.

While the capacity to provide quick and easy insights and access to party policy statements online is technically possible, it isn't often done. Even traditional media outlets tend to turn it into a shopping list or a tool for punishing parties rather than a tool for informing the public and improving policy discussions within and outside parties.

That's why prior to last election I participated in a Google doc project to map the policies of various parties, which prompted some very interesting conversations, but has not been maintained.

I suspect it is also part of the motive behind the latest attempt to 'crowdmap' the policies of political parties at govmonitor.org

The Govmonitor site (http://govmonitor.org)

This, however is a far more visual, accessible and interactive approach than the prior collaborative document idea, providing for easier searching and visual identification of what policies and positions parties support, don't support and haven't made a decision on yet.

The site offers a range of ways to view content, by party, by issue and by topic, with a full text search as well.

It also provides an easy way for people to contribute, adding party policies or positions on issues complete with evidential links and references supporting the party positions.

This is an excellent example of Gov 2.0 in action, providing information and education through evidence-backed crowd-sourcing to support people to identify the parties their views most correlate with.

It is also a great first step as a site, with the potential to expand to support robust issue-based discussions and allowing individuals to state their positions and connect them to like minded people. There's also quite broad international potential as the same approach can be applied to any level of politics anywhere in the world where citizens have a role in selecting their leaders.

Chris Doble has done a great job with this site and I hope it gains increasing attention and traction as we move closer to the next federal election.

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If citizens can help explore galaxies, unfold proteins, track birds and transcribe texts, why can't they help analyse government data?

One area of Gov 2.0 I really think hasn't been thoroughly considered or adopted by many governments, including in Australia, is the process of having citizens help in the creation, exploration and analysis of data.

Is it due to a lack of time, money, imagination or courage?

I don't know, but I would dearly love to see more government agencies consider how they could engage citizens in crowdsourcing initiatives that could help society.

Let me give a few examples of what I mean.

Galaxy Zoo is a collaborative effort from a range of universities and astronomers to classify galaxies in our universe. The site launched in 2007 with a paltry one million galaxies visualised.

The site worked by allowing people to register to classify galaxies (as either spiral or elliptical), with multiple classifications used to verify that each classification was correct.

The team behind the site thought it might take two years to classify all million galaxies, however within 24 hours of launch, the site was receiving 70,000 classifications an hour.

In total more than 50 million classifications were received by the project during its first year, from almost 150,000 people.

This effort was so successful that the team took a selection of 250,000 galaxies and asked people to analyse them for more detailed information, calling this Galaxy Zoo 2. Over 14 months users helped the team make over 60,000,000 classifications.

This work has led into a number of lines of research and supported scientists in understanding more about how our universe works.


Planet Hunter takes a more focused approach, looking for planets around other stars. A collaboration between the group behind Galaxy Zoo and Yale University, it works on a similar basis whereby users register to look for signs of planets based on data from radio telescopes.

Users mark likely targets and, over time, when sufficient users have marked a star as a likely target, the professional astronomers analyse that star in depth.

The site is an experiment, and there's no indication of how many planets have been found using the process, however as the human eye is particularly good at detecting patterns or aberrations, while computers can struggle, it has a good shot at success. The classifications by humans may also help in improving the computer algorithms and therefore make computers better at detecting patterns in data which may indicate planets, or could be used for detecting patterns in all kinds of other data as well.

eBird is an initiative from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society launched in 2002. What it does is aggregate bird sightings by location from professionals and amateurs to better match the range, migration patterns and changing distribution of bird species.

The system is the largest database of its kind in the world and in March 2012 alone participants reported more than 3.1 million bird observations across North America - data that is valuable to educators, land managers, ornithologists, and conservation biologists amongst other groups.

The data can be viewed on maps by species or as bar and line charts to explore when in the year particular birds are in a particular region. The site also supports gamification elements, listing the top 100 eBirders and tracking each user's personal record of sightings.


Fold.it is a site where users can solve scientific math problems through playing games. The site is most famous for the speed at which gamers solved an AIDS protein puzzle that had stumped traditional scientific approaches. Gamers solved the puzzle in less than three weeks while scientists had been struggling with it for thirty years.

Supported by both universities and corporate interests, the site is exploring many biological puzzles related to protein folding that offer hope for solving many of the worse diseases and conditions afflicting humans and our domesticated animals and plants.

Again the site includes a ranked ladder of the most successful players and offers ways to socialise and share information.

Whale.fm is a great site for whale lovers as it's a place where people can listen to whale songs from Killer and Pilot whales in order to match their patterns. Supported by Scientific America, the site contains thousands of samples of whale songs.

Users can listen to snatches of song and listen for patterns, providing data that help marine researchers answer questions such as how large is the call repertoire of pilot whales and do the long and short finned pilot whales have different call repertoires (or ‘dialects’)?

Teamsurv also has a watery focus, involving mariners to help create better charts of coastal waters, by logging depth and position data whilst they are at sea, and uploading the data to the web for processing and display.

The information collected by the site helps improve nautical maps and thereby reduces risks at sea, helping sailors and reducing rescue costs.

While still in early stages and very european focused, this crowdsourcing site has great promise. I'd like to see a similar concept extended onto land, using cars with GPS as the collection point of atmospheric and traffic data that can be used to map microclimates and plan traffic measures.

BlueServo, on the other hand, focuses on collecting land-based data on the movements of illegal immigrants across the Mexican-US border. Using a range of web cameras, users are asked to watch for movement and report people crossing the border to the Texas Border Sheriff.

Called the Virtual Border Watch, the approach currently involves twelve cameras and sensors at high risk locations, though the site doesn't actually list how successful the project has been (though why would it).


reCAPTCHA is the crowdsourcing tool that people don't notice they're participating in. In fact you've probably participated in it yourself.

The system, now owned by Google, uses snippets of digitalised books and documents as 'CAPTCHA codes' - those images of letters and numbers used to help stop spambots, programs designed to break into systems to send spam messages.

Whenever you verify you are human by retyping the letters in a reCAPTCHA image you are contributing to the preservation of millions of vintage books through digitalisation, with a 99.5% accuracy rate. In fact, the accuracy of reCAPTCHA matches that of human "key and verify" transcription techniques in which two professional human transcribers independently type the data and discrepancies are corrected.



Trove is last crowdsourcing project I'll mention, but definitely not the least, the project by the National Library of Australia to digitalise old newspapers, using people to correct errors in digital scanning. I've discussed Trove before and it continues to go from strength to strength, judging from the Hall of Fame of content correctors.

Tens of millions of lines in newspapers have been corrected, improving the accuracy of Australia's historic record (the Trove site even lists my blog in its archive.


If you're interested in finding more examples of crowdsourcing, a good first stop is the Wikipedia page listing crowdsourcing projects.

Can't governments, with all that data sitting in archives, find uses for crowdsourcing too?

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Great new site - The Digital Engagement Guide

Over in the UK, Helpful Technology has released 'The Digital Engagement Guide', which aims to become one of the best sources of useful examples, tools and practical advice about how UK public sector organisations can engage online.

The site touts itself as "Part bookmark collection, part reference manual, part Q&A site, it’s a place to get inspiration, shortcuts and answers."

Whether you're after online engagement techniques, strategies, examples or want the answer to questions, The Digital Engagement Guide has it.

Most of the content is as useful for Australian, US, Canadian and other governments as it is for the UK - heck it's useful to anyone seeking to engage people online.

The site also features an awesome collection of examples of online engagement and Government 2.0 initiatives from around the world.

How awesome? See the image to the right, which is a screen capture of the examples page listing every example in the site right now. Yes, it is extremely long, so long that I'm having to write extra words simply to make this blog post long enough to match the image!

Don't get daunted by this however, you can select subsets of the examples, strategies and techniques by keyword, location and topic.

And if you can't find your own online initiative in the site, you can submit it using the Contribution page.

Dang - that image was still longer than my words... so many examples!

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Automating online activities without IT intervention - using web tools to make jobs easier

There's often lots of small - and not so small - activities that communications teams want to carry out online that would make their jobs easier, but aren't really tasks to give to IT teams.

For example, you may wish to update your agency's Facebook and Twitter profile pictures when your logo changes, automatically post your blog posts to LinkedIn and Facebook, be sent an email whenever someone tweets at you or receive an alert whenever your Minister is mentioned in a breaking news story.

This is where it is useful to get familiar with services like IFTTT and Yahoo Pipes.

IFTTT, or "IF This Then That" is a simple logic engine that allow you to string together a trigger  and an action to create a 'recipe' using the format IF [trigger] then [action].

For example, below is a recipe used to automatically tweet new posts on this blog:

A recipe in IFTTT

This sounds very simple, but it can be a very powerful labour saving tool. Each trigger and action can be from different online services, or even physical devices.

A recipe in IFTTT (click to enlarge)

Recipes can be more complex, with various parameters and settings you can configure (for example the recipe above has been configured to append #gov2au to the tweets).

For example, at right is the full page for a recipe that archives your Tweets to a text file in your Dropbox.

Besides connecting the trigger (a new tweet from you) with the action (posting your tweet in Dropbox),  you can choose whether to include retweets and @replies.

You can set the file name where your tweets will be stored and the file path in Dropbox, plus you can set the content that is saved and how it will be formated.

In this case the recipe is set to keep the text of the tweet (the 'Text' in a blue box), followed on a new line by the date it was tweeted ('CreatedAt') and then, on another new line, a permanent link to the tweet ('LinkToTweet'), followed by a line break to separate it from following tweets.

You can add additional 'ingredients' such as Tweet name and User Name - essentially whatever information that Twitter shares for each tweet.

Rather than having to invent and test your own recipes, IFTTT allows people to share their recipes with others, meaning you can often find a useful recipe, rather than having to create one from scratch.

In fact I didn't create either of the recipes I've illustrated, they were already listed.

There's currently over 36,000 recipes to choose from, for the 47 services supported - from calendars, to RSS feeds, to email, to social networks, to blogs and video services, from SMS to physical devices.

All the online services that can be 'triggers' for IFTTT

It is even possible to string together recipes in sequence.

For example, if I wanted to update my profile image in Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and LinkedIn, I can set up a series of recipes such as,

• If [My Facebook profile picture updates] Then [Update my Twitter profile picture to match]
• If [My Twitter profile picture updates] Then [Update my Blogger profile picture to match]
• If [My Blogger profile picture updates] Then [Update my LinkedIn profile picture to match]
• If [My LinkedIn profile picture updates] Then [Update my Facebook profile picture to match]

Using these four recipes, whenever I update one profile picture, they will all update.

Also it's easy to turn recipes on and off - meaning that you can stop them working when necessary (such as if you want to use different profile pictures).

However there's limits to an IF THEN system, which is where a tool like Yahoo Pipes gets interesting.

Yahoo Pipes is a service used to take inputs, such as an RSS or data feed, webpage, spreadsheet or data from a database, manipulate, filter and combine them with other data and then provide an output with no programming knowledge.

This sounds a bit vague, so here's a basic example - say you wanted to aggregate all news related to Victoria released by Australian Government agencies in media releases.

To do this in Yahoo Pipes you'd fetch RSS feeds from the agencies you were interested in, 'sploosh' them together as a single file, filter out any releases that don't mention 'Victoria', then output what is left as an RSS feed.

Building a Yahoo Pipe (click to enlarge)

But that's getting ahead of ourselves a little... To the right is an image depicting how I did this with Yahoo Pipes.

Here's how it works...

First you'll need to go to pipes.yahoo.com and log in with a Yahoo account.

First I created a set of tools to fetch RSS from Australian Government agencies. These are the top five blue boxes. To create each I simply dragged the Fetch feed from the 'sources' section of the left-hand menu onto the main part of the screen and then pasted in each RSS feed URL into the text fields provided (drawing from the RSS list in Australia.gov.au).

Next, to combine these feeds, I used one of the 'operator' function from the left menu named Union. What this does is it allows you to combine separate functions into a single output file. To combine the Fetch feed RSS feeds all I needed to do was click on the bottom circle under each (their output circle) and drag the blue line to a top circle on the Union box (the input circle).

Then I created a Filter, also an 'operator' function and defined the three conditions I wanted to include in my final output - news items with 'Victoria', 'Victorian' or 'Melbourne'. All others get filtered out.  I linked the Filter's input circle to the Union's output circle, then linked the output from the Filter to the Pipe Output.

Then I tested the system worked by clicking on the blue header for each box and viewing their output in the Debugger window at bottom.

When satisfied it worked (and I did have to remove the filter condition 'Vic' as it picked up parts of words such as "service"), I saved my pipe using the top right save button, giving it the name 'Victoria RSS', then ran the pipe and published it at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=0392f5ec8f7450abbf650056c22f1e5d.

You can also see the output RSS feed at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=0392f5ec8f7450abbf650056c22f1e5d&_render=rss

Note that pipes don't have to be published, you can keep them private. You can also publish their outputs as RSS feeds or as a web service (using JSON) for input into a different system. You can even get the results as a web badge for your site, by email, phone or as PHP for websites.

An IFTTT recipe built from the Yahoo Pipe above
(click to enlarge)

Alternatively you can even combine them with IFTTT - for example creating a recipe that sends you an email every time an Australian Government agency mentions Victoria in an media release.

In fact I created this recipe (in about 30 seconds) to demonstrate how easy it was. You can see it to the right, or go and access it at IFTTT at the recipe link: http://ifttt.com/recipes/43242

So that's how easy it now is to automate actions, or activities, online - with no IT skills, in a short time.

There's lots of simple, and complex, tasks that can be automated easily and quickly with a little creativity and imagination.

You can also go back and modify or turn your recipes and pipes on and off when needed, you can share them with others in your team or across agencies quickly and easily.

Have you a task you'd like to automate? 

• Finding mentions of your Department on Twitter or Facebok
• Tracking mentions of your program in the media releases of other agencies
• Archiving all your Tweets and Facebook statuses
• Receiving an SMS alert when the weather forecast is for rain (so you take your umbrella)
• Posting your Facebook updates, Blog posts and media releases automatically on Twitter spread throughout the day (using Buffer)

The sky's the limit!

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ACT Government planning to release a data portal and real-time bus information in reusable formats

Brought to my attention by @maxious, the ACT government has said in response to their Estimates process that they are building a data portal which they aim to have ready in July 2012.

Discussed in ACT's Hansard, Andrew Cappie-Wood, Head of Service and Director-General for ACT, said that, "There is a lot of interest in gaining access to data sets so that the community can use them more effectively.", giving the example of AllHomes' use of ACTPLA data.

Cappie-Wood went on to state that the ACT government intended to progressively make data sets available, keeping privacy issues front-of-mind, but pursuing a proactive approach so that the community could make their own apps through reusing the data and also use the data in other ways useful to the community.

Later in the Estimates session Paul Peters, Executive Director, Roads and Public Transport Division, said that there was also the intention to make real-time information on the location of ACTION buses available through data.gov.au such that various players in the market can develop and on-sell their own apps.

Read the transcript in ACT Government Hansard (PDF)

• Data portal - refer to page 866
• Real-time bus information - refer to page 919

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